Revelations of a Slummy Mummy

I'm a mum of 4, but I'm so much more than that. This blog is a glimpse into my mad world-the frustrations, joys and heartache of raising 4 kiddies, one of whom is particularly special, and trying not to lose myself along the way. Join me on my journey, I promise it'll be a hell of a ride!

Monday, 29 June 2015

Today is Monday. And today I am exhausted. After a couple of
weeks of feeling like we were winning the battle against epilepsy, we had an
epic fail over the last few days. I can’t describe exactly how draining this
journey is; every single day is an unknown and the Lennox-Gastaut syndrome
demands every ounce of our energy in caring for B. Up until now the most prevalent seizures B has
had have been obvious. Big head or body drops, being flung backwards across the
room, being unresponsive and vacant. Distressing to watch, and time-consuming
to record, alongside the constant background decision making on what
necessitates extra meds intervention versus what B can cope with. The seizures
are so sneaky though. Once you think you have a handle on what’s going on, it
all changes.

On Thursday B needed to be woken up- for a child who
regularly wakes between 4.30 and 5.30 am bouncing off the walls and ready for
the day this was highly unusual. More alarm bells started ringing when he
couldn’t physically climb out of bed without support. He was shaking all over,
clumsy, minimally responsive, uncoordinated, unable to feed himself breakfast,
and most notable of all, unable to walk properly without someone helping him. I
wrote in his home-school communication book* so school were aware of his
presentation, and sent him on the bus. At around 11am I had a call from school,
who were concerned that B hadn’t picked up, in fact he was progressively
getting worse. It’s worth noting at this point that every time my phone flashes
up with a call from school, my heart is in my mouth. It’s almost always a bad
thing. In the early years it was usually due to a fall or bump (hyperactivity
plus clumsiness does not a bruise-free child make), nowadays it tends to be
around the seizure shit. Although I’ve never admitted this out loud, a tiny
part of me always wonders if they’re ringing to tell me the unspeakable-
whether that phone call is THE phonecall- the one where they tell me it’s all
over. That we’ve lost him.

They phoned again a while later to tell me he had fallen
asleep. I advised leaving him an hour and waking him then if he hadn’t woken
independently. Cue another call an hour later to let me know they couldn’t wake
him up. At this point we decided together to intervene with seizure meds to try
and break up whatever the hell it was that was going on, which apparently
didn’t really do much. B slept the rest of the school day, briefly woke up and
ate something, and then promptly climbed on me and fell asleep again. This
whole pattern continued until Saturday evening. On Sunday morning B was
brighter, and continued to progress until by the afternoon he was back to his
typical self. We did however begin to see some new odd movements which may be
different seizures emerging. Watch this space.

Due to a combination of poor communication, logistics,
inexperience (on both ours and the local hospital’s part), and the fact it was
a weekend (I shit you not) we couldn’t get the required EEG that would have
confirmed our concerns around B being in non-convulsive status epilepticus. So
if any of you out there are thinking about going into status, make sure you
don’t do it on a Friday in Dorset. Poole EEG department ain’t got time for that
shit. (In fairness, a certain member of Poole EEG department didn’t have time
for that shit; the other experiences we’ve had with those guys have been
great.) Non-convulsive status epilepticus is effectively a constant seizure
state- in literal terms, an actual headfuck. In NCES all of a person’s
electrical signals to co-ordinate their movement, thought processes, and
general function are completely scrambled; hence they appear dazed, confused,
lethargic, vacant, unable to perform usual skills and just ‘not there.’
Although not imminently life threatening, leaving a person untreated in this
state for prolonged periods of time will cause neuronal damage; in other words,
permanent brain damage will start to happen. In a child like B we simply cannot
afford for him to lose communication, skills and function that has taken years
to consolidate.

So, after two incredible weeks of fairly good seizure
control, the beast returned with a vengeance. It was hideous to watch, so I can
only imagine what B was going through. Lessons have been learned. Next time we
won’t wait to see how it pans out, we’ll act ASAP with the urgency that should be
applied to any child showing unresponsiveness and complete polar opposite
behaviour to their normal. Especially since this is a child with a multitude of
diagnoses and difficulties. Today I have spent time debriefing with school and
speaking to medical staff about protocol should this happen again. We’re all on
the same journey aboard the Unknown Express to Who-The-Hell-Knows-Where. The
ride is turbulent at best, soul-destroying at worst, we are all shattered, and
we seem to be off road in a place where few have been before.

Today I want to get off.

*The home-school communication book is a vital piece of kit
for children like B. Imagine sending your child to school with no ability to
communicate how their morning had been, how they were feeling or what was
happening to them at any given moment. Then imagine picking your child up from
school, asking about their day, and them being incapable of answering you. This
is where the home-school diary wins out. Every morning we write the things B
can’t say, and every evening we check out the communication from school so we
know how his day has been. A little extra piece of admin every day. Because the
universe thought we didn’t already have enough.

Monday, 8 June 2015

So, this week is rare chromosome
awareness week, and I’m attempting a blog-a-day in the spirit of raising some
awareness around the impact of a rare chromosome disorder on every day ordinary
life with our everyday ordinary family.

I thought I’d start at the
beginning, seeing as much of the focus on social media today is on D-day-
diagnosis day.I can’t remember the
actual day or time we received our news, but I do remember not having the first
idea what any of it meant. And I also remember how I felt. There had been almost
three years of appointments, therapies, watching my baby boy’s future unfold
into an entirely atypical toddlerhood and fighting to get medical professionals
to listen to my concerns in the lead up to D-day.

When B was born, he was dead. Clinically
speaking. His Apgar score was one, and when he was placed into my arms he was
the same grey-blue colour as a dolphin. Unfortunately due to all my babies
being back-to-back, and the odd labouring pattern this brings about, I only had
a student midwife present at the delivery since they thought I would be pushing
a lot longer than I actually was. After what seemed like an eternity the
student midwife pulled the emergency buzzer and a whole paediatric crash team came
bursting through the door. I had just enough time to watch S’s wavering
expression as he weighed up staying with me versus following our lifeless
newborn outside as they worked on him beyond my view. He went with B, which I
am forever grateful for. B was small and vulnerable and he needed his daddy.

Apart from some hypoxic shock (where
your blood gets too acidic since it’s been transporting carbon dioxide rather
than oxygen around, and your body tries to compensate) B pinked up nicely after
being bagged and we were allowed home the next day. Or, as is the case in a lot
of overflowing maternity wards, politely moved along! We proudly took our
beautiful firstborn son home, but B was unlike any of my other children- while
the girls had to be constantly upright and watching the world go by, B lay on
his playmat disengaged and disinterested in his surroundings. The girls sat up
at five months and continued to hit every milestone far earlier than their
peers; B was floppy like a ragdoll and didn’t manage to hold his head up
properly until around nine months. The girls were constantly babbling and chattering,
while B made no noises at all. The only way I can describe it is he seemed to
be born without instincts; no recognition or crying for hunger or tiredness,
and no outward need to be held or interacted with.

He also did this odd little thing
from time to time where he would suddenly go blue, pedal his arms rigidly, and
stop breathing. Me, being the no-nonsense mum that I was, presumed it was just
a wind issue or something because he would always return back to normal
afterwards. I was concerned enough to mention it at his eight week check-up
though, and the doctor looked at me like I was crazy. Right on cue, B decided
to show off his skill and the GP freaked out and sent us straight to A and E.
Absolute utter parent fail. He then did it again once we got to the ward and
the whole place erupted- they whisked him from me and worked on him to get him
breathing again. I was completely mortified- I’d been letting this go on for
eight weeks, and given the reaction of the hospital staff, this was clearly NOT
the right call on my part. Ooops. We were admitted and discharged a week later
no closer to unravelling the mystery, but had been made to undertake resuscitation
training should the need arise. B continued to stop breathing at random moments
throughout the first year of his life, and it became the norm for us, although
B has scared the shit out of many a Joe Public in his time!

One chaotic episode followed another
and it became increasingly clear our little boy was far from ‘normal’. We were
referred to Great Ormond Street to test for muscular dystrophy, but that came
back clear. B had weekly physiotherapy which (slowly) helped build up his
strength. Our community paediatrician was entirely unhelpful and wrote me off
as a neurotic parent since I was so young and as she saw it, slightly
Google-happy. I, however found the world wide web a brilliant source of help. I
did a lot of research around B’s symptoms and kept coming back to autism.
Heading to the National Autistic website I noted B hit every single one of
their 16 red flags for autism. Armed with this, I went back to the community
paediatrician and argued for an ASD screening. She reluctantly agreed, even
though she had labelled him with Global Developmental Delay which seemed to
satisfy the medical professionals involved with him. GDD is a term given when
a- they have no idea what is going on with your child or b-can’t be bothered to
investigate what is going on with your child. It describes the symptoms and not
the causes of a child’s delays, and in terms of accessing services is pretty
useless.

Unsurprisingly, B aced the autism
screening and came out with a clear diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder
(ASD). He was 26 months old, and all I felt was floods of relief. It was
something I’d known for a long time, and while it didn’t change anything, it
paradoxically changed everything. Now there was a cause, a reason and we could
arm ourselves with a strategy.

Yet I still had a niggling feeling
in my gut. A feeling that while ASD was part of the picture, it didn’t explain
everything. There were too many other weird and wonderful things about B that
were not encompassed by that diagnosis alone. So I carried on researching, and
fighting to get B a karyotype. A karyotype is a blood test that sets out a persons
chromosomes under a microscope to screen for any abnormality. Things like Down
Syndrome, Fragile X, and Angelman’s Syndrome- all examples of disorders where
too much or too little of certain chromosomes go on to have serious
implications in the bodies and lives of those affected individuals. My
community paed sensed I wasn’t the kind of person to give up easily once I had
convinced the rest of B’s therapists to support me, and she eventually agreed
to do the test. Blood work was sent off to London and usually took a few weeks
for results, so we waited. The medics told me there was a 90% chance it would
come back showing nothing, since autism and global developmental delay often
occur in otherwise healthy people with normal chromosomes.

A few weeks later. D-day. B was
almost three years old. The phone rang, and it was the paediatrician from the
local hospital with the long-awaited results. Something had come up on the
test. As she continued her words blurred and I heard splinters of information
but struggled to focus on the whole call. Too much chromosome 15….. maternal
side……rare…. geneticist……not much known……a handful of cases in the UK. I hung
up the phone and a numbness washed over me. What the fuck did this mean? As I
googled duplication 15q syndrome and read over the information I found, I went
through every emotion imaginable. Shock, fear, grief, despair, sorrow, anger,
relief, vindication. I had fought this all the way, and I was right to have
done so. My child was different. Every cell in his body had too much chromosome
15 material which explained all his difficulties. But this was super rare, and
not much was known about it. What was known was horrible and very hard to read.
Seizures, autism, risk of sudden death, recurrent infections, mobility problems,
severe communication delay, profound learning difficulty…. The list went on.

Finally gaining a diagnosis had
plucked me from Uncertainty Street and whisked me super speed straight over to Planet
Unknown. And then the real journey began…..

Tuesday, 19 May 2015

I’m a British citizen, and I love my
country. Traditional cream teas, incredible stretches of coastline, ironic British
summers, rainy bank holiday barbecues, and a general stoic attitude to life. I
love that my country has a welfare state, a system which endeavours to ensure
people’s basic human needs are met, regardless of their social economic status,
education, or experiences in life. I love our NHS. In fact, I am hugely reliant
on our NHS for B. He has severe medical needs and I am literally dependant on
the NHS every single day for his survival. If you haven’t seen the recent film
Paddington then you’re missing out. Clever scripting and great performances
follow the hilarious adventure of a Peruvian bear, sent to the far flung land
of London for safety following a devastating earthquake and destruction of his
home. Britishness personified. Paddington
also shows some wisdom beyond his years. ‘Mrs Brown says that in London
everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in. I think she must be
right - because although I don't look like anyone else, I really do feel at
home. I'll never be like other people, but that's alright, because I'm a bear.
A bear called Paddington.’

Following the recent election I’ve been
trying to collate my thoughts into some sort of legible piece- something which
proved a lot harder than I first imagined. Whichever way you voted, there’s no
doubt that the result was a shock to the British public; an overwhelming blue
majority left the rest of the country wondering where it all went wrong. It’s
true that our seat system doesn’t make for fair democratic representation. It’s
also true that a third of the eligible electorate chose not to use their vote,
but, those things aside, the overwhelming feeling on Friday morning across the
country was a bleak and hopeless one. Maybe it’s because I hang out with people
of a similar mindset, but my social media feeds were full of people desperate
to know why we had not only voted the same government in again, but how this
time round we’d voted them in to govern alone.

Austerity has hit hard the last few
years, globally as well as nationally, and as a working class member of society
with a disabled child the cuts have been deep and wounded us savagely. I know
it’s terribly un-British to talk about the m-word, but hear me out. The leaders
of today’s government are privileged enough to have come from homes where
private education, private healthcare and well above average incomes abounded.
David Cameron himself said he wasn’t in politics to defend privilege, but
instead to spread it. I’ve unfortunately not felt the benefit of any of that
privilege-spreading. In my lifetime, rents and house prices have soared, those
from low socio-economic status have been priced out of higher education by ever
increasing tuition fees, and the cost of living has risen disproportionately to
the wages people earn. Forgive me Mr Cameron, but that doesn’t sound like the
furthering of privilege.On the contrary
it suggests the intensification of an ugly elitism already prevalent and
hell-bent on polarising the British people into those able to build on inherent
wealth and privilege, and those scrabbling around in a wholly unsupportive and
unrealistic economic climate.

Stripping back all the political
rhetoric, I want to make this personal. I grew up under Thatcher’s regime; born
into poverty to parents struggling to make ends meet, and the first child of a
sick mother and an uneducated father. Of course back then the kind of sickness
my mum suffered with, mental illness, wasn’t recognised like it is now, and
services were fairly non-existent excepting admission to psychiatric
institutions for those most severely affected. After mum had me, she went on to
have my sister, and her mental health deteriorated steadily with the pressures
of raising two small children alone on minimal income while our dad found
forces work abroad to make ends meet. She didn’t have family close by, and our
only support network was the local church, which was, incidentally, incredible.
The thing is, my mum needed more support than a cuppa and a shoulder to cry on.
She needed professional help to manage her bi-polar disorder (and other
associated diagnoses) alongside bringing up her kids, not least because on my
fourth birthday my dad decided it was all too much and left in search of a
newer, better life.

That was the beginning of a pendulous
existence for Mum, swinging wildly between varying periods of institutional
‘care’ and managing at home with minimal community support. For us as children,
it meant a life spent carouselling between friends houses, home (where we cared
for mum, presumably to save the state money on essential professional support)
and short or medium term foster placements. The nature of mum’s disorder meant
she was often unable to get out of bed or function on any sort of living
standard level. Serious self harm featured regularly, and she acted
impulsively, failing to adequately manage the little money she was offered by
the state to ‘live’ on. Dad was never held to account in contributing
financially to support his children, and so responsibility for our survival as
a family fell to mum. Responsibility she just wasn’t able to deal with. The
worst thing about this all? We were mum’s world; she would have done anything
in her power to keep us safe and give us the life she never had. But that’s
exactly the point- none of this was within her power. She was ill. Just like
cancer, except that this sickness didn’t qualify for support from the system.
And like cancer, this sickness led to a downward spiral of guilt, anger, and
more depression, exacerbating the already hugely prevalent issues in our little
family. Some weeks we were sent into school with a packed lunch consisting of
nothing but a piece of buttered bread and some water. Other weeks we had to be
taken home from school by teachers since mum never made it out of bed that day.
I remember being chilled to the bone during double glazing and central
heating-free winters in clothes and shoes that were frankly inadequate for such
inclemental weather. All the while feeling the responsibility of caring for Mum
and my younger sister; making sure I knew the numbers to ring if I couldn’t
wake Mum up, or scraping together a hot meal from the freezer to feed us,
reassuring my sister that whatever happened I wouldn’t let them split us up if
we had to go into care again.

Essentially, while the Tories continued
to bring the country into economic success, families like ours fell off the
radar. Poverty was pushed out of sight, where it remained out of mind for those
who weren’t affected. Blame was placed squarely on the shoulders of those who
found themselves in less than favourable circumstances, and while the country
thrived from the outside, a whole subgroup of people went deeper and deeper
into despair.

My mum actually passed away in January
of 2013. For her, the damage inflicted by the system supposed to protect and
support vulnerable people was too much. She passed away from pneumonia at the
age of 54 during a particularly cold winter, too scared to switch on the one
gas fire in the house for fear of not being able to pay the bill. Her mental
health had by this point impacted on her physical health, and she had a host of
additional physical diagnoses which became too complex for any one field of
doctors to deal with effectively. Mental health professionals decided she
needed medical support, while medical professionals passed her care to the
mental health department. As such, everyone became complacent in her care, and
as a direct result, she died. After her death I found over £30,000 worth of
debt in her name, lots of it amassed through loan consolidation companies that
had done nothing but increase her troubles, preying on her at her most
vulnerable. Banks had lent her money she could clearly not afford to repay, and
her embarrassment and shame was such that I never even knew about any of this
until after her death.

This is the true cost of austerity. Real
people, in real situations, with all-too-real struggles. I’m a British citizen,
and I love my country. I love its people. And I see far too often, how the government
does not. How the mantra of the middle classes is money first, people second. I
know the system is strained, and I know decisions need to be made about
tightening our collective belt, but what does it say about us as a nation when
we use that belt to choke those who already have no voice? I want a better
future for my boy and others like him. And as a wise man once said, a nation
should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but how it treats
it’s lowest ones. Do we really value diversity? Do we treat those lowest
citizens with the respect they deserve just because they are fellow human
beings? Can everyone, like Paddington, fit in, even when they are different?

Manifestos
and policies are in danger of reducing people’s worth to what they are able to
contribute economically, but humanity demands a different measure. A measure
not easily identified by charts, or graphs, or numbers, but one of higher-order
thinking. My child will likely never be able to contribute financially to
society, but he has taught so many people so much on multiple levels. We cannot
and must not use people’s economic ‘worth’ to make decisions on the help and
support they are entitled to; this moves us as a nation into seriously
precarious territory. I’m an idealist, and in a country as rich as ours, no
child should be going without food. No disabled person should be lacking in
care support necessary for their basic human dignity. Those with mental health
problems should be adequately supported, not institutionalised. Those
struggling with poverty-stricken environments should be facilitated, not
vilified. Please, please, think for yourself on these things. Because this
matters; literally, in a life and death kind of way, this really matters.

Humanity
necessitates humility, and humility means sometimes saying, we fucked it all
up, let’s start over. I can’t change my childhood experiences, but we owe it to
the next generation to change theirs. Everyone is valuable, everyone has
something to contribute, and everyone is worthy of the chance to be the best
person they can be.

Success
is a dreamer who never gave up. Let’s dream the dream together and make a
better world happen.

Tuesday, 6 January 2015

A good friend recently suggested I write
about where I’m at on my current journey with church, and more importantly, my
current journey with God. As a forewarning I’d like to make it clear that this
piece is in no way meant as an underhand dig at Christians, or a vent for my
less than pleasant feelings towards church and some of the people in it. I
don’t have any issue if you choose to take up the Christian faith (or any other
faith for that matter); your particular life choices have no bearing on me and are
entirely yours to make. So before you get your knickers in a twist reading my
potentially ‘offensive’ opinions, hear me out. This is my personal take on life
from where I happen to find myself right now. Brutal? Perhaps. Honest? Always.

Most of you who know me will know that up
until recently, a huge part of my identity was my burning passion for Jesus. I
wholeheartedly believed in the fundamental gospel, that I was inherently in
need of saving, and that God had provided a convenient route via Jesus’ death
and rising. Furthermore, I felt the need to share this truth with all I came
across, to ensure they didn’t befall a fiery eternal death, and to ‘win’ people
for the ‘kingdom.’

Even writing those words is difficult now.
I cringe when I think of all the jargon and judgment I poured out on so many
who were unlucky enough to cross my path. If that was you, I’m truly sorry. My
arrogance was born out of a genuine concern for people, based on the ‘truth’ I
built my life on, but looking back, I was a total numpty. It’s not all bad
though. I made some incredible friends on my Christian journey. Perhaps it was
the social glue of a common belief system, or the minimal group paradigm;
whatever it was, some of those friends remain friends for life in the truest
sense of the word. I also geared my life to helping others, by no means a bad
thing.

The falling out of faith came slowly, then
all at once. A bit like falling asleep, except this felt like waking up. The
more I stepped away, the more clarity I had. It started with irritation at
people offering to pray for us when B wasn’t sleeping. And by not sleeping, I
mean not sleeping. At all. Ever. People prayed and nothing changed; and when
they asked and I honestly told them nothing had changed, they would step up with
some bullshit about God’s plan being bigger than we can understand. There was
literally no good to be had from B not sleeping, so why couldn’t an
all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing God just do something about it? Oh yes.
There must be a bigger plan. One that God in his infinite wisdom had chosen to
withhold from little old human me.

This dissonance between what I was taught
about God and what I actually experienced in my everyday began to grow. People
would share about how God gave them a parking space, or how they suddenly had
money during a period of financial difficulty, or how God had answered their
prayer about the lady down the road accepting their invitation to a church
event. All the while I was delving deeper and deeper into a world totally beyond
my control. A child whose needs continued to become increasingly complex; who
didn’t sleep, who had multiple medical issues, who became a danger to himself
and others around him and whose future was entirely unknown. So God answered
prayers about parking spaces but remained silent on things that actually
mattered. Bigger picture stuff apparently. It didn’t sit right with me.

Being completely honest, working for the
church has had its downsides and did nothing to reconcile the struggles I had.
At best, the tactics used to ‘win people’ are misguided, at worst,
manipulative. I’m talking as someone who has seen and experienced the inner
workings of church. Granted, not all churches operate in the same way, but when
the secular world offers better support to it’s employees than the Christian
sector, something is out of whack. I have painfully watched my husband suffer
completely unnecessarily as a direct result of decisions made by the very people
meant to be supporting him, supporting us. The reason? The relentless pursuit
of agenda and programme; the chase of masses over the minority.

At this point I chatted to some trusted
friends about how I felt. Some were helpful, some repeated the bigger plan
mantra like a broken record. Probably the best advice we had was not to throw
the baby out with the bathwater, not to make big decisions about faith off the
back of emotional hardship. Good advice. I went away and started to research
the whole thing. Origins of Christianity, church history, anthropology in general.
In truth, I was desperate to find some tiny thread of conviction to keep me in
the faith. Letting go of something that has been your way of life for so long
is not easy. It’s unsettling, and difficult, and shifts your entire outlook in
so many areas. Equally, remaining part of something I could no longer
truthfully conform to is not who I am. I’m hardwired personality-wise to be true
to myself and true to others; naturally non-conformist, you might say.

Despite my desperation to find the anchor
I needed in my adrift state, the more I read, and the more I observed, the less
convinced I was. The horrific genocide in the Bible, justified by an all-loving
God. The gruesome wars that continue to the present day based on faith. The
controlling manner of an institution that expects people to conform to what it
thinks or run the risk of being sidelined for expressing a different opinion.
The disrespect and arrogance of pushing ‘truth’ on a world capable of making
it’s own decisions. A creator God, who created us knowing we were inherently
flawed and then punished us for it anyway. An overarching idea that we’re
screwed from the start; worthless and destined for death without the
intervention of the God who created us that way in the first place. A God who
supposedly wants a friendship with his people, but remains intangible and
mysterious when things go to shit, who could change things but chooses not to. The
Bible, really? A collection of writings picked out by a committee back in AD 363,
which Christians can’t even agree on.

The deal breaker though, came in
repeatedly watching church services and meetings where the atmosphere and
ambience is cleverly orchestrated by the set-up (music, persuasive language etc.)
to facilitate an ‘experience with God.’ A kind of high, if you like. The same
emotional feeling one might undergo at a particularly touching concert, or when
reading a good book. Except when this happens, and is encouraged, in a
Christian setting the person involved is informed that God is at work in them,
and the emotionality of the situation is exploited to full gain of the church.
I have unwittingly been part of that very set-up, setting the lighting just
right, and putting on emotional music in the background to invoke an
environment where essentially people are made vulnerable and their responses
can be attributed to God being at work. This emotional component is a common
thread throughout all faiths, meditation etc. and seems to fulfil a human need.
That’s great. My issue comes when this is attributed solely to the God of
Christianity, with all other parallel experiences being written off by the
church as human or demonic based activity, in and of itself wrong and
unhelpful.

I look back at what S and I did as youth
pastors and for the most part feel a sense of pride at giving the young people
fun experiences. We were pretty good at what we did! ;) Then I remember the
teaching times and, as much as we always communicated to the kids to go away
and weigh things up for themselves, we also told them what we believed to be
God’s truth. Essentially, given their vulnerability as adolescents and their
trust of us, we told them what to think. I hate that I did that. Looking at my
own kids, I want to give them as broad an experience as possible. I want to teach
them to be decent human beings, but aside from that they should be free to
believe whatever they determine is the right path for them. To bring them up in
the constraints of the Christian faith, with a fairly narrow mind-set, is
unhelpful and confusing. I know of too many young people who have major issues
because their thought processes conflict the teachings they have been brought
up with. They go through their teen years, which are difficult enough, with a
heavy burden of guilt and shame about what God, their parents and the church
may think of them. I don’t want that for my kids.

Equally, I see all the awesome things the
church does for society. Toddler groups, parenting courses, marriage courses;
all brilliant community builders. My sticking point is the claim of the church
that these things are building God’s kingdom. In their opinion that’s what is
happening, but to someone no longer subscribed to Christian theology these
things are just awesome community events. I guess my main issue is the Christian
arrogance that their way is THE way. I cringe saying that, remembering the many
times on an evangelistic rant telling people outright that God’s way was right
and their way wasn’t. ARGH! Sorry people! How absolutely disrespectful.
Prefaced with ‘I believe..’ or ‘My opinion on this is..’ I have no issue, but
when ideas are communicated as fact we run into problems.

In conclusion, where I’m at is this. I
can’t believe in the God of Christianity anymore because ultimately, it makes
no sense to me. Trying to resolve the dissonance between what I have been
taught and what I have experienced of God takes too much energy and emotional
expenditure. Energy and effort I just don’t have to spare.

Am I the same person? Absolutely. I still
maintain a positively altruistic take on life and make my decisions accordingly.
I am still capable of doing good stuff without needing to put it down to God
working through me. Equally I am still able to mess up and recognise the need
to take full accountability for it. I no longer feel at odds with myself, a
frequent feeling in my previous Christian journey. If I want things to change
in my life, I am responsible for changing them with action, not a wing and a
prayer. I’ve honestly never felt more empowered and liberated. Please don’t
pity me, or pray for me, or make judgments on my angry and embittered soul. Not
that I should even need to say this, but I’m not angry, or bitter, and I’m not
temporarily absconding. I’ve not had a glitch in my faith due to circumstance.
Right now, this is where I’m at.. And it’s an amazing place to be.

I don’t know what’s out there, but I do
know this. I will continue to work towards making the world a better place to
be through my actions and choices. I will keep loving, keep hoping, and keep on
keeping on regardless of what life throws my way.But personally for me no god is part of that
picture. I’ve got it covered myself.